Faster! Faster!

by E M Delafield

  Frances said goodbye to him, gave him a kiss and a box of sweets, and assured him that she had enjoyed their afternoon very much.

  “Perhaps we could do it again next term,” she suggested.

  “Oh yes, please,” said Maurice eagerly.

  He went into the changing-room feeling happier than he had felt for a very long while. A kind of tightness, that had held him in its grip, seemed to have gone.

  “Hallo, fool,” said a contemporary amiably.

  “Fool yourself,” Maurice returned. “Have a sweet?”

  (5)

  “I’ll have one bunch of single daffodils, and one of jonquils please,” said Sylvia.

  She paid for the flowers, and carried them home.

  It was quite a nice little house, she thought as she went up the three brick steps that led to it. And the garden might be made pretty. There was a walnut-tree, and a rather unconvincing little pergola. Beyond the split-chestnut fencing lay a rough field, and the nearest slate roof was at least a quarter of a mile away.

  It was a great deal better than Paris, to Sylvia’s way of thinking.

  She went into the tiny pantry and chose a bowl from the cupboard, then carefully cut the stalks of her flowers and began to arrange them.

  Her face was serious and absorbed. Some indefinable change had passed over her so that, although she was still pretty, the soft, child-like radiance of a few months earlier had left her altogether. She had also grown noticeably thinner.

  When the flowers were done, Sylvia carried the bowl into the sitting-room. It was an ordinary, small room in which some of the furniture from Arling was just beginning to look at home.

  The wireless stood in a corner. Sylvia switched it on, listened for a moment to the kind, explanatory tones of an uncle describing elephant life in the jungle, and then turned it off again.

  She looked at her watch.

  Half-past five.

  At least an hour before her father would be home.

  I could go and help Nelly in the kitchen, thought Sylvia, or do my accounts, or write to Taffy. But she did none of these things. Instead she sat in an armchair, holding some mending in her lap, but putting in scarcely any stitches.

  She felt very old and responsible.

  It would always, she supposed, be like this now. Ordering father’s meals, and running the house as economically as possible, and meeting new people—who were very kind, but never seemed quite real—and trying to plan ahead for Maurice’s holidays.

  That was one thing. Maurice was very easily made happy. He only wanted the wireless, and books, and a little grown-up conversation. Much easier than Taffy. All the same, one missed Taffy terribly.

  Only everything’s so absolutely different now, thought Sylvia.

  She wondered, as she had very often wondered, whether if her mother hadn’t been killed they would have left Arling just the same and come to live up here, near Daddy’s job.

  It was marvellous that he should have got a job—and such a good one. And the people had been very nice, and found him this little house, and agreed that he should move into it at once instead of going on living at the club.

  It’s queer, she thought, how I always said I’d really rather stay at home than go and work somewhere. Though I never imagined it would be like this. Just Father and me.

  He was very kind nowadays, and scarcely ever impatient. He said Sylvia was a splendid manager. She supposed that he said it to encourage her, for she never remembered hearing him praise her mother, who had been so wonderful.

  Sylvia lost herself in remembrances that, to her faithful heart, would never be anything but dear and beautiful.

  The ringing of the electric bell at the front door roused her.

  The postman, with the second delivery.

  “All right, Nelly! I’ll go,” called Sylvia.

  She took two letters from the postman’s hands and hoped vaguely that one of them might be from Frances Ladislaw to say that she would come and stay with them for Easter. Frances was always nice, and Father liked her, and Mother had been fond of her.

  Sure enough, one of the letters was addressed to her father in Frances’s sloping Edwardian hand that looked to Sylvia’s eyes so old-fashioned.

  She glanced at the other and saw that it was addressed to herself and that it was from Andrew Quarrendon.

  The colour flooded her face.

  She heard from him sometimes although not often, and the letters never failed to stir her profoundly.

  She had not seen him since he had left Arling, in the dawn of an August morning that seemed separated by a whole lifetime from the present.

  Sylvia went slowly back to the sitting-room and moved unconsciously towards the desk that had been her mother’s. Standing beside it, she very carefully slit open the envelope with a paper-knife, drew out the letter and read it.

  It was very short—much shorter than usual.

  For the first time, Andrew Quarrendon asked her to see him. Knowing in what that would probably end, he said—would she meet him one day very soon in London? The letter finished with the words: “I love you.”

  Sylvia, dazed, read them over and over again. She knew that she wanted to see him again, to hear his slow, modulated voice, to feel his arms round her, more than anything else in the world.

  She thought of her mother.

  But of course, Sylvia told herself, she’d have understood. She wouldn’t want one to go on always being lonely and unhappy. She’d have said, surely, that the time had come when Sylvia should make her own decision. Howoften one had heard Mother use that very phrase!

  Sylvia even smiled a little at the remembrance.

  Suddenly and irrationally, she felt convinced that her mother knew about the letter. She knew that Sylvia and Andrew belonged to one another, that they were bound by something that was essential to both and that could no longer be denied. Somewhere, she knew and understood.

  Sylvia, wanting to believe this, for the moment did believe it so implicitly that she uttered a little low ejaculation of inarticulate thankfulness, feeling that her mother heard it.

  Then, the tears shining in her eyes and her heart tremulous with sudden happiness, she wrote her letter to her lover.

  (6)

  The work in the Norfolk Street office continued.

  No one sat at Claudia’s desk, but Sal Oliver had had her own table brought down to the larger room. Downstairs the conversation of Miss Frayle and Miss Collier continued intermittently, between their outbursts of strenuous industry.

  “I found a bit about reducing exercises in the paper this morning. You can get seven pounds off in ten days, it says. Not that I think it’s true,” observed Miss Collier.

  “It might be true if one kept it up,” Miss Frayle said, “but one never does. It’s quite difficult enough to get out of bed in the mornings at the ordinary time without making it ten minutes earlier so as to lie on the floor and try and touch the ceiling with your toes or whatever it is.”

  “That’s what I say.”

  “The woman Sarah has lost weight, if you ask me.” Miss Frayle by this mode of speech sought to give a great effect of detachment.

  “Oh well, she had a bit of a shock last October. We all had, come to that.”

  “Yeah. Life’s a pretty bloody show. Think of those poor kids.”

  “Well, thank God she didn’t know she was leaving them. There couldn’t have been time.”

  For the hundredth time they discussed the details of the accident, for the hundredth time Miss Collier shuddered and looked thoroughly sick, and Miss Frayle’s blue eyes grew dark and pitiful at the thought of Claudia’s children.

  Edie came in with her tray and placed cups of tea on the table.

  “Mrs Ing. wanted some,” she explained, “and I thought you might like it, the weather being so damn cold.”

  “Edie,” said Miss Frayle, “if you said what I think you said, leave the room. What young girls are coming to, nowadays!”

  Edie giggl
ed.

  “No, but Miss Frayle, really I mean, it is something chronic, the cold. Just look at my fingers!”

  “Try soap and water, young Edie.”

  Mrs Ingatestone bounced in with an open notebook in her hand. Her hair, which had received attention the day before, was the colour of a brass bedstead.

  “Good morning all,” she cried gaily. “Sorry I couldn’t get down before. Miss Frayle, hop along upstairs dear, she wants you to take down her letters. And there’s a child to be met at Waterloo and taken to the dentist at twelve—I’ll do that myself. Miss Collier, she wants that lease for the house in Hertfordshire. You know—the people home on leave from India. They’ll be in this morning.”

  “O.K.,” said Miss Collier.

  “You get back to your telephone, Edie, there’s a good girl. If you want something to do, there are plenty of circulars to be got ready.”

  “What about that novel of yours?” Miss Frayle enquired. “Where the hell’s my note-book?”

  “Now, now, now!”

  “O.K. I’ve found it.”

  “Run along now, Edie.”

  “O.K., Mrs Ingatestone.”

  Upstairs, Sal gathered together the threads of the day’s work.

  It was all going well enough, she thought, and if she could only afford to advertise a bit more it would go better still.

  Perhaps something could be done with the weekly papers. She made a note of the idea.

  Outside it was dark and very cold.

  Miss Frayle’s light, decided fingers knocked at the door.

  “Come in,” said Sal.

  In the second’s interval between the words and the appearance of her secretary, she lost herself in a brief but radiant dream of taking a month’s holiday in the summer and going to the South of Spain.

  Yes. She’d do that.

  Definitely.

  “Good morning, Miss Oliver. Utterly suicidal weather, isn’t it?”

  “Quite. I think we’d better have the light on, Miss Frayle.”

  “O.K.”

  The work went on.

  (7)

  Copper Winsloe swung himself off the tram, turned up the collar of his mackintosh, and prepared to walk the last half-mile. Betsy followed him, obediently keeping at his heels and eyeing with some disgust the stream of cars that flashed along the high road.

  Copper was rather glad that he’d given up the idea of a car. The trams were handy, and the exercise good for him. He felt better than he’d felt for years. Soon it would be Easter, although no hint of spring was in the raw atmosphere nor did the thorny hedges show any glint of green.

  The Easter week-end would be a very busy one, with any luck. He’d be at the club all the time.

  But if Frances Ladislaw came down she’d arrange something for Sylvia and Maurice so that it wouldn’t be too dull for them. Copper felt, regretfully but helplessly, that Sylvia didn’t have much of a time nowadays.

  Sal Oliver wanted her to go and stay for a bit in London, next time Sal’s friend was away and there was room. Well, she must go. It was a shame Taffy should be having all the fun.

  There’d soon be young Maurice’s Public School outfit to think about too. Copper decided that he ought to see about that himself. After all, he knew more about what kind of things a boy needed than any woman could.

  And he’d take Maurice there himself, when the time came.

  Copper reached the house and went up the little steps.

  He hoped that there would be a letter from Frances Ladislaw. Somehow they’d drifted into a correspondence, and it had become by imperceptible degrees an important thing in his life.

  I always liked her, he thought.

  Dimly, at the back of his mind, a wistful hope was slowly taking form.

  Putting his key into the door, Copper turned it and entered the tiny hall.

  There was the letter from Frances on the table, waiting.

  From the sitting-room where the radio stood floated a thin, stuffless, melancholy phrase in a minor key:

  “ Good—night—ba-by—

  Sleep—tight—ba-by——

  Let’s—call—it—a—day”

  Rhythm, slang and sentiment in the modern pattern, combined in an undeeded farewell.

  THE END

  This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © E. M. Delafield 1936

  The Moral rights of this author have been asserted.

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  ISBN: 9781448203062

  eISBN: 9781448202737

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